Grania and Murdough had parted meanwhile upon the top of the ridge close
to the old Mothar Dun, he going west, she east. When she reached home
she found the cabin door still shut, a hen and clutch of chickens
sitting upon the step waiting to be let in. It was evident that no one
had been either in or out since she left it five or six hours before.
Inside the cabin was very dark, and Honor’s thin white face showed
ghost-like against this setting. She was half sitting, half lying, upon
her bed, with her eyes closed, though she was not asleep, a board and a
pillow covered with a bit of old striped cotton supporting her.
Everything around had the peculiarly chocolate hue of peat. The cabin
was clean--for an Irish cabin commendably clean--but the whole had the
deeply-dyed, almost black, hue of a Rembrandt background. The face of
the sick woman herself might have come from the canvas of quite a
different master. Early Italian painters have all tried their hands at
it. How well we know it!--that peculiar look, a look of toil-worn
peace--peace caught as it were out of the inmost heart of pain;--the
hollow cheek, the deeply-marked eye-sockets, the eyes looking out as
prisoners’ eyes look from their dungeon bars;--we all recognise it when
great art shows it to us, though rarely, if ever, otherwise. Upon a
canvas Honor O’Malley’s face might have been the face of a saint or a
martyr. It _was_ the face of a saint or a martyr, as saints and martyrs
find their representation in these days of ours. Three long years the
poor woman had lain there dying. Consumption had its hold upon her. It
had been very slow and deliberate in its approaches--nay, in its earlier
stage might have been arrested altogether had there been any means at
hand of attempting anything of the sort, which, of course, there were
not. Who can say what hours of pain had worn themselves out in that
smoke-dyed corner? Who can say how many supplications had risen out of
its recesses, how often the eternal complaint of the sea licking the
base of the cliffs had seemed to Honor the voice of her own silent
complaining, the unresting cry of the night wind her own dumb cries made
audible? She had won peace now. She was dying comparatively quickly.
Mercy was fast coming nearer and nearer, and would presently touch her
with its wings.
Grania’s step sounded on the rocks without, and she looked up suddenly,
a smile of welcome waking in her hollow eyes.
‘Is it yourself, it is, allanah?’ she exclaimed joyfully as the younger
sister came quickly in, pushed upon the shoulders of the gust which
always lurked in the throat of that gully.
‘’Tis myself, and ’tis wanting me you have been this while back, Honor,
I know,’ the girl replied in quick tones of self-reproach.
‘Augh, no, child, ner a bit; ’twas only I--’ here her voice was stopped
by an access of coughing, which shook her from head to foot and brought
a momentary flush to her poor sunken cheeks.
Grania stood by penitently, helpless till the paroxysm was exhausted and
the coughing had ceased.
‘’Twas the potatoes,’ she said apologetically when Honor again lay back,
white and dry-lipped. ‘’Tis a bitter while they take this year,
whatever the reason is; and then Phelim, the creature, came, and I got
listening to him, and then Murdough Blake and--’
‘Wurrah! whist with the tongue of you, and don’t be telling me, child!
Is it within the four walls of a house I would be keeping my bird all
the long day?’ the sick woman said with tender impatience. ‘’Tis the
uselessness of me, I was going to say, kills me. Never a pot cleaned nor
a thing done since morning. But there! God knows, and He sent it; so
’tis all for the best, sure and certain.’
Grania without another word picked up the three-legged black pot, and
ran to fill it at the well outside, setting it down on the fire when she
returned, and beginning to mix in the oatmeal by handfuls for the
stirabout which was to serve for their evening meal.
Honor lay watching her, her face still flushed from the last fit of
coughing, the perspiration standing out in drops on her forehead and
under her hollow eye-sockets, but a great look of content gradually
spreading over her face as her eyes followed her sister’s movements.
As long as it had been possible she had gone on working, long, indeed,
after she ought to have ceased to do so. Her spinning wheel still stood
near her in a corner, though it was nearly a year since she had been
able to touch it. Her knitting lay close at hand. That she still
occasionally worked at, and even managed to mend her own clothes and
Grania’s, and to keep her own immediate surroundings sweet and clean.
Irish cabins are not precisely bowers of refinement, yet this corner,
where Honor O’Malley’s life had been for years ebbing slowly away, told
a tale in its way of a purity which, if it did not amount to
refinement, amounted to something better. Outside the wind howled,
sweeping with a vicious whirl over the long naked ledges, loosening here
and there a thin flake of stone, which spun round and round for a moment
like a forest leaf, then fell with a light pattering noise upon the
ridge below. Inside the sods crackled dully, as the fire blown by Grania
ran along their ragged brown sides, or shot into a flame whenever a
stray fibre helped it on.
Besides the two owners, and not counting an itinerant population of
chickens varying in ages and degrees of audacity, the cabin boasted one
other inmate. The dog tax being unknown, nearly every Irish cabin has
its cur, and on the Aran isles the dogs are only less numerous than the
babies. The O’Malleys, however, had no dog, and their house-friend (the
_r_ in the last word might appropriately have been omitted) was a small
yellow, or, rather, orange-coloured, cat, noted as having the worst
temper of any cat upon Inishmaan. Whether in consequence of this temper,
or in spite of it, there was no cat who appeared to have also so
constant a train of feline adorers. Remote as the O’Malleys’ cabin
stood, it was the recognised rendezvous of every appreciative Tom upon
the island, so that at night it was sometimes even a little startling to
open the door suddenly and catch the steady glitter of a row of watchful
eyes, or to see three, four, or five retreating forms creeping
feloniously away over the rocks.
‘’Tis the milk she does be tasting already, the little snaking beast,’
Honor said, pointing to it, as it sat furtively licking its lips close
to the hearth.
Grania struck the cat a light tap on the nose with the iron spoon she
was stirring the pot with, an insult to which it responded with a
vicious spitting mew, and a backward leap, which seemed to set all its
orange-coloured coat on edge in a moment.
‘Was it along by the sea-way you were to-day, allanah?’ Honor pursued
presently.
‘I was, sister.’
‘Did you pass by the old chapel?’
‘I did, Honor.’
‘Then you said, I’ll be bound, a prayer at the little old cross for me,
as I bade you do?’
‘Well, then, Honor, I will not tell you a lie--no, I will not--but I
never once thought of it,’ Grania replied penitently. ‘You see, Murdough
Blake he was with me, and we got colloguing. But sure, sister asthor,
don’t fret, and I’ll go to-morrow by the first streak of day and say as
many as ever you tell me, so I will, Honor.’
Honor for answer sighed and lay back against the wooden settle as if
some habitual source of trouble was weighing upon her mind.
‘Grania, it is a bad thing for you that there is no priest on Inishmaan,
a very bad thing,’ she said, earnestly, an ever-present source of
anxiety coming to the front, as it often did when she and Grania were
alone. ‘How is a young girsha to learn true things if there is no one in
it to teach her? When I lie at night in bed thinking, thinking, I think
of you Grania, and I pray to God and the Holy Mother, and to all the
tender saints, that it may not be laid against you. Sure how can the
child know, I say, and she never taught? The Holy Mother will know how
’twas, and may be when I get there, Grania, she’ll let me say the word,
and show that it was no fault of yours, allanah, for how could you know
and none here to teach you, only me that knows nothing and less than
nothing myself?’
Grania’s fierce grey eyes filled for a moment. Then with a sudden
impulse she flung her head back, lifting the iron spoon she had just
tapped the cat’s nose with, and holding it defiantly in front of her.
‘Then I don’t want none of them to be learning me, only you, Honor--so,
I do not,’ she said irritably. ‘I couldn’t bear to be driven or bid by
any of them--so, I couldn’t!’
‘Is it a priest, Grania? My God! child, you don’t know what you’re
saying! A priest! Why, everyone that ever was born into this world, man
or woman, must obey a priest. You know that right well yourself, and
what would be the end of them if they didn’t, so you do.’
‘I don’t care. I would not be bid, no, not by anyone,’ Grania answered
defiantly. ‘And the priests arn’t all so good as you say, Honor, so they
are not. I mind me there was a young girl over by Cashla way told me of
the priest where she lived--Father Flood his name was--a terrible hard
man he was, and carried a big stick, so he did, and beat the children
frightful when they were bould--yes indeed. And one day she was going
herself to the chapel and hurt her foot on the way, and couldn’t get in
till Mass was half over. And Father Flood he saw her coming up, and he
frowned at her from the altar to stop by the door, and not dare come
nearer. So she waited, trembling all over, and wanting to tell him what
happened. But presently he come down the chapel, and when he got close
to her he caught her without a word by the side hair--just here, Honor,
she told me, above the ear--as he was passing by to the door, and pulled
her by it right after him out of the chapel. And when they were outside
he shook her up and down and backwards and forwards as hard as he
could, yes, indeed, as hard as ever he could, she told me, and she
crying all the time, and begging and praying of him to stop, and every
time she tried to tell him what hindered her he just shook the harder,
till it was time for him to be going in again, when he gave her a great
push which laid her flat on the grass, and back with him himself into
the chapel again. And she only ten years old and a widow’s child!’
Honor sighed. ‘’Tis hard, God knows, ’tis hard,’ she said. ‘The world is
a cruel place, especially for them that’s weak in it. There is no end to
the pain and the trouble of it, no end at all,’ she said in a tone of
discouragement. ‘But, Grania dear, sure isn’t it what we suffer that
does us the good? “Pains make saints!” I heard a good woman I used to
know, that’s dead now, say that often. “Pains make saints,” “Pains make
saints,”’ she repeated softly over and over to herself.
‘’Tisn’t the hurting I’d care about,’ Grania said scornfully. ‘I’ve hurt
myself often and never minded. ’Tis being bid by them that have no call
or care to you. If one done to me what was done to that girl at Cashla
I’d hit him back, so I would, let him be ten times a priest.’
Honor gave a sudden scream of dismay. ‘Och then, whist! and whist! and
whist, child!’ she cried, piteously. ‘What are you saying at all, at
all? Saints be above us, Grania, and keep you from being heard this day,
I pray, amen! Sure a priest’s not a man! You know that well enough.
_Wurrah! wurrah!_ that you would speak so! And I that learned her from
the start! Holy Virgin, ’tis _my_ fault, all _my_ fault. The child’s
destroyed, and all through me! My God, my God, what will I do? Och, what
will I do? Och, what will I do, at all, at all?’
Grania ran remorsefully and put her arms about her sister, whose thin
form was shaken as if it would fall to pieces by the sudden violence of
her trouble. Honor let herself be soothed back to quietness, but her
face still worked painfully, and on her pale brow and moving lips it was
easy to read that she was still inwardly offering up petitions
calculated to appease the wrath thus rashly evoked.
Grania’s penitence was real enough so far as Honor was concerned, but it
did not alter her private opinion as regards the matter in dispute. ‘I’d
think him a man if he hit me, let him be what he would!’ she repeated to
herself as she ran into the next room to fetch the milk set out of reach
of the cat since the morning’s milking.